Scheduling and remembering appointments for a group of people such as constitute a family can be difficult. Co-ordination of activities of different individuals is a complex task that entails planning, rescheduling, cross-referring and then replanning as well as delicate skills of diplomacy. As a consequence ‘family calendaring’, to coin a verb, has a number of particular properties. First, it is mainly carried out by one family member, most often the mother. This person has the difficult and delicate task of representing the doings of numerous other members of the family so as to make those doings visible to all whilst being responsible for this task herself, alone. Second, and relatedly, where calendars are located, and further, where most of the interaction with them is undertaken, tends to be in one particular place. This place is not merely contingent on where a family resides, but is selected because the location is one that ensures maximum visibility of the calendar to all those affected by it. Furthermore, the location is chosen so that when changes are made, by the mother for example, the acts of making these changes are more likely to be seen by those affected. Finally, the location is chosen so as to ensure that the calendar is juxtaposed to other material artefacts, letters, notices, scribbled notes, etc, that are at various times relevant. As a consequence, most family calendars are paper-based, and displayed or hung in family kitchens.
Family calendars, then, have particular properties, related to what they are used for, who they are used by and where they are located. This creates various deficiencies and problems. Most obviously, family calendars are difficult to access from the many locations that different family members may find themselves during the day. For example, if a child of the family is at a sports session with their mother and finds out important information about a change of time for the next session, that child or their mother is unable to immediately add that information to the calendar. By the time they reach home the new time for the next session may well be forgotten. Some families use multiple paper and digital calendars to avoid this problem but this leads to problems in synchronizing information between those calendars. Further, the need to cross reference items on a family calendar to other materials—notes, letters, as mentioned—means that understanding the implications of a new calendar event when remote for the main calendar is not always possible or ideal. Finally, the act of making such changes may be less visible to those affected if those individuals are not the ones making the changes.
Various attempts have been made to help ease these and other difficulties. Web-based digital family calendars are available, for example, whereby family members are able to access and edit a shared calendar using a web-browser from different locations, such as at the office, in the home and at school. But these have their own set of problems. First, nearly all such calendars require qwerty keyboard data entry and WIMP interface devices; in other words they assume that wherever family members might be, and irrespective of what family members might be doing, they will have access to the appropriate input devices. As the example of a child and his mother attending a sports session above indicates, this cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, this is precisely the main problem of such web-based solutions: they presume uniformity of input.
This is not the only problem these web-based systems suffer from. A further one, also made clear in the sports event example, is that they suffer from the fact that remote decision making is often based on deficient levels of information, much of that which is relevant to the calendar being displayed alongside it in the home setting. This information, often but not always paper-based, is not visible remotely.
A further problem with remote calendaring systems is related to the need to ensure that when changes are made those changes are made visible to those effected.
If these are problems that web-based systems have when considered from the remote users point of view, they also provide difficulties locally, at home. If remote users find qwerty-wimp interface devices difficult to access, then it is also the case that such devices are inappropriate in the primary domain, such as in a kitchen. Here, users may find it undesirable to use a keyboard and mouse, having foodstuffs on their fingers; kitchens may also be unsuitable places for keyboards and mouse anyway with flecks of flour, bread, and greasy material likely to suffuse and render inoperative keyboards and mouse.
Some attempts have been made to deal with these various problems. The most successful to date have entailed the use of stylus-based tablets with bespoke calendaring applications that allow remote viewing and editing.
Nevertheless, the difficulty of providing an ideal solution to the family calendaring problem and, in particular, problems such as related to mode of interaction remotely and distinguishing it from that possible locally, are not completely solved by these solutions. A number of additional solutions have been offered, and these focus in particular on the problem of the remote mode of interaction. The most common entail web-based access to calendars over mobile phones, whereby data entry is enabled through the use of ‘one-handed’ input techniques. These combine data entry on non-qwerty keyboards with soft button data entry (i.e. buttons that change function dependent upon task) and navigation through predefined screens enabled by interaction with what might be described as the mobile phone analogue to the PC mouse, namely the ‘navi-key’. Despite their functionality, these designs universally suffer from very poor usability, however. Users find them complex and slow; they also find errors easy to make and corrections difficult to impose. The result is that most users avoid trying to access and interact with their calendars in this way.
It is known to use a tablet personal computer (PC) in place of a family paper wall-calendar. In this way a digital family calendar is provided which is inkable in that family members are able to edit it using electronic ink. Using a graphical user interface, a calendar display is presented on the tablet PC. With a tablet PC stylus a user is able to hand-write in electronic ink on the calendar to make, delete or edit entries. Multiple client computers may be arranged to provide the calendar display using a remote server to synchronize the calendars. It is also known to make this type of calendar accessible via a web-browser to enable family members to view and edit the calendar from different locations via the Internet. A tracking component is provided with the calendar to track changes and present a change history to enable family members to tell what changes have been made by other members.